


The Boston Bugle

by softly_speaking_valkyrie



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Action, Combat, Cute, Dates, F/F, Fallout Femslash, Femslash, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Kissing, Lesbians, Love, Mild Combat, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-15
Updated: 2018-06-15
Packaged: 2019-05-23 21:46:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14941953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softly_speaking_valkyrie/pseuds/softly_speaking_valkyrie
Summary: While scavenged another stretch of the collapsed and ruined highway around the hills of the Commonwealth, spending quality time together and with Dogmeat, Piper and Nora encounter sound Raiders as per usual, and after dealing with them, Nora finds a relic of the Old World so out of place it gives her an idea…





	The Boston Bugle

Piper loaded another drum magazine into the chamber of her fully-automatic pipe rifle and continued onward along the highway with Dogmeat following between herself and the raven-haired feminine army that was Nora, or Blue, as Piper always loved and adored to refer to her as. Nora was Piper’s woman out of time, propelled two hundred years into the future from 2077, seemingly to be her significant other, and the Diamond City broad in her newsgirl cap smiled whenever she began to think about it. A small and quaint giggle left Piper’s lips before she could stifle it and she saw Dogmeat’s tail wagging blissfully as he trotted closer to Nora, nipping at her heels.

The reporter and journalist could not help but continue to smile at the sight of the canine companion that followed her and her girlfriend whenever they left the protection of the makeshift Sanctuary gates to scavenge for supplies or anything they might need. Another giggle left her mouth and this one was audible enough to be picked up by her dearly beloved pacing on ahead.

“What’s so funny, hey, hon?” Nora asked with a broad smile across her lips.

The darkness of the authority sunglasses she’d pilfered from a basement around Cambridge masked the deep brown recesses of her gorgeous eyes. As Piper close the gap between them, her gorgeous lips still curled in her feline-esque grin she set the pipe rifle around her and rested it on her back by the sling so she could have both hands free. She stood close to Nora and reached for the corner of the frames of the sunglasses, removing the visage from Nora’s eyes and seeing the whiskey brown of them. Nora beamed as she looked into Piper’s eyes and saw them glistening. The loneliness (save the hound) of the highway they were sheltered in as they traversed the Commonwealth was something they always enjoyed. Nora had her Pip-Boy 3000 attuned to the slightly lack-lustre Diamond City Radio (although Nora had to admit it was far more appealing than Radio Freedom).

“Would you like to ride in my rocket sixty-nine? Rocket sixty-nine, rocket sixty-nine!” Piper heard coming from the small analogue speaker grills of the wrist-locked Pip-Boy, which seemed to make her giggle all the more as she held Nora’s spectacles in a closed hand wrapped around with the other around her neck as their noses almost made sweet contact.

Nora leaned in, nipping at her girlfriend’s nose lovingly with her own like some form of a small animal, innocent and playful. “Come on, huh? What’s got you giggling so much this afternoon? Did someone stick some paper to my back?” Nora teased as impishly as she could manage. While substantially older than the youthful Piper, even without the two hundred years she spent in cryo, Nora never once acted older than her significant other. They were both as dorkish and high-spirited as the other, always behaving like this.

Piper let out a chuckling cry above them and brought her nose back in close to her lover’s, kissing Nora on each cheek in time, one after the other, and again.

“I was just thinking how funny it was how Dogmeat nips at your heels sometimes. He really fawns over you, Blue,” Piper revealed, still trying to stifle her laughs as Nora held her close. Suddenly the henched and masterful woman out of time hoisted Piper into the air and spun her around, the pipe rifle knocking against her padded back. Piper was still wearing her red leather overcoat that had draped her body since she was tall enough to pull the look off effectively. Nora had always thought she looked lovely in it, attractive and irresistible at times.

Nora set her down again and cupped Piper’s cheek gently, but smiled mischievously. “So you were laughing at my dog, huh, Miss Wright?”

Before Piper could answer, Dogmeat let out a loud and alarmed bark that took both of the women’s attention. Nora’s fight response took hold of her body as Piper lagged in responding to the situation. The way Dogmeat was barking further off along the highway ruin and snarling in between bouts of barking, his tail resting on the floor and his canine body tense, Nora could tell it was his telltale sign for danger. Contact.

“Trouble?” Piper asked her lover, pulling out her pipe rifle again from her back by the well-crafted stock. Dogmeat quieted himself and moved closer to Piper to defend her in case it was Ghouls.

Nora slammed her right hand onto her Pip-Boy to cut the music but the shoutings of other humans were already heard on ahead. That meant Raiders, or Slavers, or Synths if the Institute was continuing operations from some of their holdouts the Sanctuary scouts had reported still existed. The Glowing Sea was home to plenty of places that the Institute could relaunch itself from. Nora glanced behind her to her lover and pulled up three fingers to indicate the number of distinguishing voices she could make out. Piper nodded and replied with a small gesture with her own hand. It was their visual code that Nora and Preston had developed for the away teams to use in cases such as these. The gesture Piper made with her fingers was to ask if they were dealing with Synths, as there were plenty of the clankers still roaming the Commonwealth with orders to kill Nora on sight for destroying M. I. T.

Both women looked onward, scrambling to take cover behind two massive chunks of rocky debris from the upper level of the two-story highway as they heard more voices coming closer.

“Ah, I told ya I heard barking, how the fuck did you not hear it too?” One of the contacts was asking the others in an identifiable masculine voice. Piper got a good look of them through her short scope, made in Sanctuary like the rest of the rifle.

“Oh for fuck’s sake, shut the fuck up, Gary! We didn’t hear the fucking bark okay? Haven’t even seen a fuckin’ dog in months, this ain’t the Capital Wasteland, this be the Commonwealth, shithole from corner to corner!” Another of the male Raiders responded to the one seemingly called ‘Gary’. Nora found it a terrible name, especially for a Raider, but she looked to Piper to gauge whether or not she wanted to proceed. Dogmeat was silent, perfectly trained for this.

A swift nudge of Nora’s head asked Piper if she wanted to engage, there was no use in one of them committing to combat from a stealthy position if the other was not only unready but feeling hesitant and just wanted to leave. With Cait, this would have already slipped into gunfire and fighting, but Piper was even more cautious with engagements than Preston Garvey. Nora liked her lover’s versatile stance on fighting for her life, picking fights.

This time, Piper, eager-eyed and smiling, nodded firmly and enthusiastically, aiming her rifle down range at the oncoming group of Raiders. Nora predicted there would be more behind them, and these three were simply a trio broken off from the main pack. Both women found them in their scopes and when they were finally ready, after a few seconds that Nora gave her lover to ensure she was ready, the sole survivor kicked her foot into the side of a car nearby, causing a loud clang to ripple around them. All three of the Raiders took notice and drew their pistols and melee weapons.

“Drop ‘em!” Nora called and she fired two round into the heads of a pair of them, leaving the third for Piper, who she slotted with tactical precision and readied for more Raiders coming for them. Dogmeat began to bark again.

Five more Raiders soon took the place of the three, not yet clocking onto the position of Nora and Piper but as the two women shot at the group again, only three hit the floor in one. Nora fired three rounds into the chest of the most armoured one and he fell but did not die, whimpering as he dragged himself behind a debris boulder. Piper was still precise, putting down the two attack dogs before they could smell them out. Another three of the opposition drew small arms and took cover with the wounded Raider, patching him up with stimpacks and bandages, thrusting a pipe rifle into his hands. Before much longer they had spotted where both of the warrior women were firing from, seeing the flashes from their rifles.

A quick and lucky shot nicked Nora in the shoulder and she screeched in pain. “Fuck this! Piper, cover me!” She called out across the highway and ducked behind the debris, slamming a stimpack needle in her shoulder and dapping down the grazing wound with a pad of gauze.

“Screw you, Raider assholes!” Piper called out to them and let rip the bullets from her piper rifle, going fully automatic and peppering their position with gunfire. Dogmeat was still barking at them for he could do little more form his position unless the hound wanted to draw fire. He could not suppress them.

Nora brought her lover’s attention back to her with a shout of her name. She tossed Piper a grenade with the pin still stowed in it.

“What do you want me to do with this?” Piper asked, her rifle rested on the rocks and still occasionally firing some bullets at the Raiders while Nora patched herself up in looked in their massive bag of supplies for something else to be using. She eventually found it - her combat rifle.

“Throw it, babe!” Nora yelled at Piper. The journalist finally clicked and pulled the pin from the grenade. Nora was quick now; she traced the grenade and kept her eyes on it as it flew into the air and across the battlefield toward the enemy. They were still firing, and Piper and Dogmeat were huddled behind the debris serving as cover. Nora closed one eye and held the other down the reticle ring of the combat rifle. With a smile as sultry as the one she was giving Piper earlier, she fired a single round from the semi-automatic weapon and the lead soared across the space the grenade had travelled, piercing the shell and detonating it before it could hit the floor. Several heads of the opposing forces popped in a flurry of shock, shrapnel and flame blast from the explosive. All were destroyed and killed, their charred corpses flying all over. Some of the Raider’s lifeless shells fell off of the highway and into the ruins of Boston. The conflict fell apart and after a few seconds of nothing, of silence, Nora breathed out in strained exhalation, setting the combat rifle down next to her.

Piper let go of Dogmeat and crawled over to Nora’s embrace, holding her close and kissing her cheek, careful not to make contact with the bloody glancing wound that the Raiders had inflicted. Dogmeat whimpered lightly and began lapping up at his owner’s hand. Nora sighed as it was over and finally let out a strained groan as her shoulder flared up with intense and fiery pain. The adrenaline from the battle was spent and now the shooting fires of the discomfort were coursing through her shoulder and her torso.

“Damn it I told you to buckle up the armour pads, Blue! Damn it!” Piper yelled at her as Nora pushed herself up against the rocks and passed her lover another couple of stimpacks and some more bandage gauze.

“I know but you wanted to head out and get to scavving,” Nora teased, calming herself as her girlfriend stabbed the stimpack rather violently into her shoulder near the wound that was once again bleeding profusely.

Piper set her finger on Nora’s lips as she unwrapped the white wrappings. “Uh! Shut up! This is in no way my fault so don’t you dare insinuate that I’m responsible for this one, Blue. Don’t you dare, honey!” She rebuked her lover’s claim and lifted her pained arm up a little, pulling at the buttons to Nora’s overshirt so she could pull out her shoulder from the now ruined shirt. “Come on work with me here, babe.”

Nora groaned again as she moved her shoulder and let Piper pull the shirt down to see the damage. The graze where the bullet had carved into the older woman’s shoulder was deep and bloody. It was a closely glancing blow but there seemed to be no damage beyond the graze.

“You okay there, honey?” Piper asked as she pulled the covering from a needle of Medex and sticking it into her love’s leg to mask the pain. The stimpack would help her recover from the injury faster and the Medex would dull the pain so she could keep going unless it was time to make back for Sanctuary. Piper wrapped the bandaging around Nora’s shoulder as Dogmeat snuggled up to her and soothed her as the journalist treated her. Neither women had been shot before in their travels around the Commonwealth, only grazed by bullets like this or hurt by other means - falling down off of things or taking the brunt of a small explosion. Cait had been singed by the edge of a molotov cocktail before and had cursed at the attackers a hell of a lot before taking a combat shotgun to each of their faces.

When all was done, and Nora hadn’t said much of anything, she let her left arm relax at her side and leaned closer to Piper as the latter shuffled and sat next to her lover against the rocks. Nora pressed her body closer to Pipers and kissed her cheek, smiling. “Thanks for patching me up, Doc Piper. I’ll try not to be so much of a badass and get shot next time,” Nora chuckled to herself after, her voluptuous chest rising and falling rapidly as she giggled. She left her shirt unbuttoned and snuggled closer to Piper’s own chest for warmth.

The slightly tanned-skinned reporter wrapped her arms around Nora, her Blue and leaned her head down to kiss her lips as the Medex kept her gently drugged up. It was powerful stuff, to have survived the radiation of the Great War.

Piper sighed lightly and cuddled Nora closer in her arms, the sack of guns and medical supplies as well as all they had scavenged along the expansive highway lay before her feet. “Oh Blue, I love you so much,” Piper confessed, looking out into the horizon of the charred and turned up Commonwealth.

They kissed again, Piper’s gentle palm coming to cradle her older lover’s cheek as they smooched lovingly behind the ruined debris barrier they had used for cover. The smell of brimstone from the cooked and exploded grenade had passed with the slight nuclear breeze and all was serene again - the conditions that would lure in Radstags, things were so tranquil as the girls lay together and kissed, Dogmeat letting out a slight noise as they got to their business. Nora lapped and nibbled at her lover’s lips, biting down on her bottom and slipping her tongue inside. Piper let out a rather primal moan low in her body and pushed herself closer into Nora’s frame, her hands sliding down the woman’s frame as they snogged lavishly. Piper got to her knees as she continued to grace her love with soft kisses, holding her face again, nipping at Nora’s perky ears - Piper loved her ears, they were positively elf-like, despite the reporter no doubt having no idea what an elf was. Nora was assured that the knowledge of fantasy outside of Grognak the Barbarian had been washed away two-hundred and ten years ago.

“Should we head back to base, Blue? Let that wound heal? I know Cait and Preston, or Danse can handle the rest of the runs for the week,” Piper suggested, straddling her lover and breaking from the kisses for the moment.

Something captured Nora’s attention from Piper to the ground, something poking out of the edge of a folder. It was somewhat laminated, and the piercing white was stark against the withered brown of the folder and crumbling grey of the centuries-old concrete of the highway floor. The white of what appeared to be paper was very familiar to Nora, but as Piper’s eyes traced her path of vision, she didn’t see anything that struck her as familiar.

“Whatcha looking at, Blue?” She asked as she scrambled off of her lover and let Nora reach over for the white corner sticking out of the folder.

The laminated white came out to be a while set of pressed pages, each laminated and containing a copy of The Boston Bugle, the copy for October 23, 2077, the day the bombs fell. Nora looked at the date under the headline - ‘The Boys Return From China At Last!’, reflecting the return of the final platoons of troopers from China and the final conclusion of the Sino-American Resource War at the time. Anchorage had been reclaimed in the January of the same year and America was apprehensive but determined to endure the sudden and violent move from then used up fossil fuels to fusion and atomic technologies, although the power of the atom had for the longest time dominated the motif of society. Nora had been there, she’d even served as a reservist in Canada during the final annexation as the Commies were pushing into Alaska. She’d been so close to combat, and then back in Massachusetts as quickly as possible.

“This was the date…” Nora heard herself say as Piper looked between her and the paper pages.

She could barely read it, barely read at all, and it all made absolutely no sense to her at all. The events of the Old World that had been blown to smithereens over two centuries ago were completely alien and confusing to her. ‘Sino-American War’ was something that she couldn’t comprehend. What even was America to Piper? Could she understand that the world that the Commonwealth belonged was once a country of fifty-one unified and united states that had once been the largest power on the global stage?

“The date?” Piper asked. Nora was suddenly slapped back into reality.

“October Twenty-third, Twenty-seventy-seven. That was the day the bombs fell, the day the world ended, Piper. I’d only just gotten out of the bathroom that morning, Shaun was in his cradle and this man from Vault-Tec came to the door telling me that our family had a place in Vault One-eleven. It was… shit, I think it was about Nine-forty in the morning, we hadn’t even had breakfast… We heard the sirens and ran. Then the bombs fell and all we saw was mushroom clouds in the sky…”

Piper gasped. “October Twenty-third was the day the war began… Holy shit,” she cursed, not knowing whether she should touch her Blue as she relived the events of the day, of her old life, long, long before Piper ever existed.

Wiping her eyes to bat away the slight tears that had instinctively formed, Nora breathed audibly. “I’m not crying over Shaun, or over Nate, before you ask,” she told Piper, controlling herself to not think about the Old World. Many times had Nora settled that she didn’t care about it anymore. She didn’t care about the house in Sanctuary that the settlers had now demolished and rebuilt upon out of respect, nor did Nora care at all about the body of her former husband in the Vault up the hill. She and Piper had picked the place clean, dealt with the crazy who had taken up residence in those ice cold corridors, and they had sealed it once and for all. Nora was alive and she was living in this world now, as harsh and brutal as it was, she loved it, strangely. The repeated music on Diamond City Radio, the mutated animals all over, the warped landscape and even the radiation storms blown in from the Glowing Sea. She actively loved this world.

“I’m just… It’s hard to think about a life I used to have… You know? But… I actually… I--”

Piper’s lips were making contact with her own and the younger broad was kissing her again, deeply and passionately. “I know… Trust me… I know, Blue.”

After they finished, and Nora felt comfortable again, she stumbled to stand, holding the paper still. “You know, we should keep this,” she suggested to Piper, tucking it into the salvage sack and giving Dogmeat a quick pet that he’d been longing for.

“Huh? Why’s that, Blue?” Piper asked, not getting why.

“Well… It’s been months since you published a new edition of Publick Occurrences… Maybe this can inspire you to take up writing a paper again,” Nora theorised, smiling slightly to the thought of Piper actually writing and typing and publishing again. They’d taken her press from the small office in Diamond City and hauled it on the back of a Brahmin to Sanctuary as the influx of settlers continued. Nat was even living with them now, protected by the excessive defences that Preston, Sturges, Danse and Nora had pilfered, acquired and often just plain stolen from the remnants of the Brotherhood of Steel chapter that remained in the Commonwealth. After Nora destroyed the Institute and threatened to do the same to Maxson, he pulled out from the region, leaving it to Nora and her forces. “We could even set up the Bugle again!”

Piper cocked her girlfriend a glance, wondering what had come over her - Piper accentuated her body and held her waist. “We? Hon, what are you thinking?” She asked, and Dogmeat barked enthusiastically.

Nora laughed and readied the gear the move out back to Sanctuary. She reached for and held Piper’s hand. “If you want… You could write the paper again… Print it, and I’ll have a word with Preston, rope the Minutemen into getting a newspaper delivery service up and running around the Commonwealth. We’ll deliver it to all the major settlements. You know, Diamond City, Goodneighbour, as well as our small settlements. They’ll love it. That’s if you want to write again,” she told her lover, as they walked back on themselves without looting the Raiders this time. They’d be there next time and they had more than enough supplies scavenged already.

There came a cackle from Piper and she smooched Nora closely on her lips again. “On Blue, what am I gonna do with you?” She asked, rhetorically and gave her hand a squeeze. “I’ll think about it… For you.”


End file.
